This time it opened.
I nearly screamed. It was Sandy, in full zombie regalia, holding a geometry textbook.
“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering me in out of the cold.
I didn’t move past the doorstep. “Is Micki here?”
“She and Radha are at home. What’s wrong?”
“I—” Sandy looked so innocently concerned.
He held his free hand up. “Wait. Don’t answer. I have to get this book to Radha before she loses her mind. Huge test tomorrow. Want to walk with me?”
I nodded, staying silent as he locked up.
We strolled down the block, Sandy picking up on my mood and keeping the conversation simple—Halloween was only a few days away, and his boss had asked him to play Dracula on the big day, a step up from his current position as a walking dead extra. “I’m not tall enough for Frankenstein, or I think he would have given it to me.”
“You’ll make a fantastic Count Dracula,” I said as we turned the corner. A quaint, modest apartment building hugged the edge of the block, its front outlandishly decorated for Halloween—large fake spiders stuck to the brick facade, fake headstones on the small strip of grass in front, and a skeleton bride and groom hanging out on the front stoop.
“This is it,” Sandy said. “We had a little fun with the holiday. The other tenants don’t seem to mind.”
It was the second time that day I was surprised by someone’s living arrangements. Sandy unlocked the door, and we squeezed into a small foyer while he checked the mail. The building was clean but old, the wood heavy and the carpeting worn.
“Third floor,” he said as we trudged up the stairs. “Micki says these stairs are what allow her to still eat carbs.”
I laughed politely, but my thoughts wouldn’t hold still. Looking at this place, it was ridiculous to think Micki was swindling old women. And with Sandy working an extra job, maybe I was headed in entirely the wrong direction.
Then I remembered the check for seven thousand dollars. Where the hell did that money come from?
“I’m home,” Sandy called out as we entered the railroad apartment. “Look who I brought with me!”
“I hope it’s the pizza man,” Micki called out. “We’re starving!”
Radha and Micki sat at a small half-moon table, flush up against the wall of a tiny kitchen. Radha, slightly disheveled in yoga pants and a too-small Harry Potter sweatshirt, was resting her elbows on a stack of paper. She held a calculator in one hand and a pencil in the other.
“Geometry was invented by people who really get off on being mean. There’s a word for that, right?”
“Sadists,” Micki said. She’d already gotten up from the table, kissed me on the cheek, and stood at the sink, filling a teakettle. “Sit,” she said, though the only available chair was where she’d been sitting.
I sat. Full of nervous energy, Micki zoomed around the tiny space, putting together something for us to eat. Sandy disappeared into one of the other rooms, and Radha groaned over her inability to find the value of x.
I glanced at the table. Micki had been pulling apart an old photo album. She’d taken photos from plastic sleeves and made little piles. “What are you doing with these?” I said, my heart quickening when I realized they were probably images of people who were related to me, and possibly my biological mother.
“Radha has a family legacy project at school,” Micki explained, placing an impressive charcuterie plate on the small circle of available space on the table. “We’re her family now, so these are her people.”
I swallowed. “And mine?”
Micki put a hand on my shoulder. “Yes.”
Sandy had popped back into the room, face scrubbed of makeup. He’d heard our interaction, but didn’t say anything, simply frowned at the photos and busied himself attending to the dirty dishes in the sink. Was he worried about Radha connecting too fiercely, only to be disappointed yet again? Was he worried about something I might see?
“Can I look?” I asked, finding myself suddenly shy.
“Of course!” Micki pulled a stool over so she could sit next to me.
I started sifting through the photos, oddly expecting to recognize someone, though that would be impossible. The sensation made me almost lightheaded—my unfamiliar past would become familiar. How would it change me?
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Sandy asked me.
No. But I was going to do it anyway. I glanced down at a photo and spotted a woman in a housedress, standing in front of a stove. “Who’s that?”
“That was our neighbor, Hattie. She watched me and Cissy sometimes when Mom was busy.” The tightness around Micki’s mouth told me her mother was busy more than she’d liked. “She would lock me in the closet sometimes. I didn’t like her. I don’t even know why I have her photograph.”
“It’s your history,” Radha chimed in. “I guess you kept it to remind yourself that it happened. Can I see her?”
I passed the photo to Radha, who carefully scrutinized Micki’s mean babysitter.
“Excuse my French, but she looks like a total, high-grade bitch.”
“She was,” Micki said.
I flipped to another. A man this time, with a suit and hat reminiscent of Frank Sinatra.
“Uncle Joe,” Micki said.
My heart stilled. “My uncle?”
The corner of Micki’s mouth twitched. “One of my father’s friends. He hung around for a while, and he was nice to me.”
I tossed that one to the side, eager to find someone I was actually related to. I picked up another photograph, a Polaroid, and stopped short. It was an early ’80s version of Micki. She sat on a sofa, cuddling a baby on her lap, her face bright with pride and love.
I scoured the photograph for details. The baby wore a pastel pink dress with yellow piping. Her cheeks were round and flushed. She looked happy. Cared for. Loved.
“Me?” I rasped.
Micki hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Your first Easter. I think you must have been nine or ten months old.”
“Why is it you holding me and not her?” Of all the emotions running through me, the one that stopped cold was anger. “I want to see her. Now, please.”
Micki shuffled through a pile of photos until she found what she was looking for. “There she is. Cissy. Your mother.”
Only technically, but I didn’t bother to correct her and focused on the photo. The image showed a shockingly thin woman in her forties, wearing cutoff shorts and a yellow T-shirt advertising a pizza joint. Her hair was the same shade of brown as mine, but frazzled and unkempt. She leaned against a kitchen counter, cigarette in one hand, glass of brown liquid in the other. Her smile was brittle and forced, and she had what looked like a purplish bruise on the side of her neck. It had obviously been many years since anyone could describe her as pretty.
“Life wasn’t easy for her,” Micki said. “Not at the start or the middle or the end.”
Compassion was in my nature. But I did understand that, though life can be made difficult by the things outside of our control, it was our choices that could turn those difficulties into catastrophe. She chose to live her life in a certain way, so in a sense, she chose the consequences too.
“She passed on four years ago, right?” My voice sounded strangely flat.
“I’m sorry you never got the chance to meet her,” Micki said quietly. “She loved you, in her way.”
“Did she ever ask about me? Try to find out how I was doing?”
“Now, that wasn’t her way. When she closed a book on something, she slammed it shut.”
I glanced at Micki. “What about you? Did you ever want to know what happened to me?”
Tears filled Micki’s eyes. “I couldn’t take it, knowing any detail. I knew you went to someone good. I told myself to be happy with that.”
“Were you happy with it?”
“No,” she whispered. “Never.”
With shaking hands, I studied the photo
again, taking note of everything, trying to commit the scene to the part of my brain developed during the first year of life, the part that knew her. The sharp line of her jaw, the glasses with the large red frames, the fingers curled around the glass of something she probably shouldn’t have been drinking.
Her fingers.
They bent unnaturally, her knuckles swollen into red, raw knobs.
“Rheumatoid arthritis,” Micki said. “She got it pretty young. It was really bad, worse than if she’d gotten it later. She didn’t have any insurance, so she couldn’t afford any medications. I always wondered if I’d get it, because our mom had it, too, but not nearly as bad as Cissy.”
“Sometimes, our moms give us all kinds of things we don’t want,” Radha said. I’d almost forgotten she was there. Her face had lost its usual animated expression, her features immobile, eyes dull. “My first mom gave me anxiety and trust issues.”
“What have I given you?” Micki said. She pretended to joke, but her question held a great deal of seriousness.
“Love,” Radha said. “You’ve given me love.”
That comment stopped my heart from jumping down a rabbit hole of blame and bitterness. There was another part, powerful though small, that thought about things in a different way. My biological mother was irresponsible and self-destructive, but she gave me my mother. In her own way, she’d given me love.
“This is your grandmother,” Micki said.
The haggard woman in the photo wore a floral dress, which, even in the saturated colors of the early ’70s, I could tell had seen better days. She gazed at the camera with contempt, and I wondered who had taken it. She clutched a coffee mug with a smiley face on it, a stark contrast to her expression, one of complete and utter misery. I noticed the telltale swollen joints on her fingers, though they were not as severe as my mother’s.
My mind instantly leaped to the DNA information, the increased risk for inflammatory diseases. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was looking at Kylie’s future.
I didn’t want to think about that, so I thought about it in another way. This woman with the dark, haunted eyes and wary expression was our history. Her illness was proof of that genetic link. So was my biological mother’s. So was Kylie’s. It was terrifying but also exhilarating. The past, the present, and Kylie could write the future. Times had changed. Our awareness could mean early treatment, and that would make all the difference.
“She wasn’t a good mom to you?” Radha asked Micki.
Micki sighed. “Nope.”
Radha simply nodded. An unfit guardian was something she was familiar with.
“She yelled and swore at us, all the time,” Micki said. “Slapped us around when we acted up. We weren’t the best kids, I’ll admit, but we weren’t the worst.”
“She had her own issues,” Radha said. “That had nothing to do with you.”
“Yes,” Micki said, drawing her foster daughter into a side hug. “You’re absolutely right.”
We paged through the rest of the photographs still in the album. I’d thought it was a full book, but there turned out to not be very many. Radha took a half dozen for her project, but her mood seemed subdued. I wondered what demons she was wrestling with. I felt strangely numb. My demons were taking a nap, sure to rise later, sparking insomnia.
Sandy finished up the dishes and wiped his hands with a damp towel, lost in thought. “Sometimes the past is a very unfriendly place,” he said after a moment. “As painful as it is, perhaps it’s wise to free yourself of it. We all understand pain, so we have to respect those who desire to avoid it. Ally, you can choose to forget this ever happened.”
“Sandy,” Micki said, a note of warning in her voice. “Once you know something this important, forgetting it is impossible.”
“She can’t forget,” Radha said. “It’s her past.”
“Radha,” Sandy said gently, “would you like someone to force you to confront things you’d rather leave behind?”
She went quiet and stared at the photos on the table.
“Would you like some more tea?” Sandy said to me, his demeanor friendly but slightly more impersonal. “You are more than welcome to stay longer.”
“I have to go back to Bernie’s to pick up Kylie and Heather.”
“Why are they at Bernie’s?” Micki said. “Why didn’t you bring them with you?”
After connecting the way we just had, questioning Micki felt like an affront. But the situation at Bernie’s didn’t seem right, and whatever the truth of the situation, I had to know, had to ask. “I stopped by Bernie’s to get a piece of the candy she’d given Kylie. The doctor wanted it.”
“She feels terrible,” Sandy said. “We’re all so glad Kylie is okay.”
Micki looked puzzled. “It’s not that you’re not welcome, but why did you come to our place?”
I swallowed, hating to go on. “Have you been to Bernie’s house?”
“No,” Micki said. “I’ve dropped her off a couple of times, but I’ve never gone in. I guess that’s kind of odd now that I think about it. She’s never invited me in. People can be very private about the strangest things.”
“She’s private for a reason,” I continued. “Her place is in bad shape. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house that seemed less like a home. It’s very empty and depressing, and pretty unsafe.”
“I don’t like this at all,” Sandy said.
“My mom’s over there right now, assessing what needs to be done. She’s going to help her.”
Micki looked puzzled. “Your mom is over there helping?”
“Yes, but . . . that’s not all. I . . . I opened Bernie’s closet to return her purse, and there were wedding dresses hanging in it. Six of them. All Micki’s Originals. She’s got some shoes and accessories too.”
There was a beat while everyone processed that information.
“Are you sure?” Radha said. “That sounds too weird.”
“I know what I saw. I wish I hadn’t.”
Micki paled. “She’s never bought anything but a lipstick. Why in the world?”
“I’m going to study in my room, okay?” Radha scooped up her books and left.
Sandy sat down in Radha’s spot. “That poor woman. We considered her family, yet we never bothered to step foot in her house.”
“She stole from us,” Micki said. “There’s no other explanation. I feel sick to my stomach.”
I believed their reactions, ashamed at how I’d jumped to the conclusion that they’d swindled an elderly woman.
“We need to be understanding,” Sandy said.
“She knows we don’t make a lot of money,” Micki said, growing angrier. “I told her. She knows. I’m very sorry if she needed those dresses to fill a need, but we’ve got to get them back. We’re talking thousands of dollars.”
“I just have a hard time believing a ninety-year-old woman carried six dresses out of our shop, and we didn’t notice,” Sandy said. “It’s not adding up.”
“She comes to the shop every day,” Micki said. “I’ll admit I don’t always pay her the most attention. I give her to Radha. That girl has such patience.”
We all suddenly sat up straighter, the answer coming to us at the same time. “Radha,” we said in unison.
She wasn’t in her room.
“Her coat’s gone,” Micki said, growing frantic. “And her backpack.”
We scrambled. Sandy and I yanked our coats on, and Micki reluctantly agreed to stay in the apartment in case Radha came back. “Find her. Hurry!”
CHAPTER 18
When Sandy and I got to the street, we decided to go in opposite directions on the main boulevard. “If she wanted to take the bus into the city, she’d need to be on the central road.” He took off before I could say anything.
I jogged down the mostly empty thoroughfare. It was almost eight o’clock, long after most people made their commute home on a dreary Monday. I kept aware, glancing around for Radha’s slim form, her yoga pants half
-hidden under her practical navy-blue coat.
The air bit into my cheeks—Illinois at the brink of November could be harsh and unrelenting. I thought about Radha, scared she’d lost another home, wandering the streets of a suburb she’d come to view as her own. She probably felt like nothing ever truly belonged to her.
“Radha!” I called out, knowing full well it was probably fruitless. “Radha!”
A serious-faced jogger gave me an odd look. Frustrated, I stopped in front of The Not-So-Blushing-Bride.
A light was on in the back of the store.
But the door was locked.
I dashed through the alley, my mind reeling with options in the event Radha was actually in the shop. Do I confront her? Hug her? Listen to her? All of the above? I hadn’t had many interactions with teenagers since I was a teenager myself. Weren’t there triple reverse psychology tricks that were supposed to work?
The back door was locked. “Radha? It’s Ally. I know you’re in there! Can we just talk?”
Nothing.
I peered through the lace curtains and thought I saw a flicker of movement. “Radha. I’m not mad at you. No one is. Not Sandy, not Micki. Let’s just talk about things.”
Nothing.
“How about I get Kylie here? Will you talk to her?”
The door opened a smidge. I saw one dark eye and the side of Radha’s mouth. She was frowning.
“Don’t get Kylie involved in this,” Radha said. “It’s my mess.”
“Okay. Can I come in then?”
“No.”
I tried to keep my tone light. “Why? What’s going on?”
Radha paused. “I’m saying goodbye to the store. If they come to pick me up, they won’t give me the chance.”
“They?”
“Children’s services. You know, the state people.”
“Oh, honey.” I tucked the tip of my boot into the sliver of the opening. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It always happens.”
Her tone was so gloomy, I decided to change my tactic. “It’s really freaking cold out here. Can I come inside for a minute to warm up? I won’t stop you from what you’re doing.”
The Other Family Page 20